Kee and I were talking on the phone, and of course the topic turned to writing, as it almost always eventually does. *g* Anyhoo, we were talking about writing characters who are outside our personal experience. Of course it must be possible, or we wouldn’t have half the literature we do. But I think the question boils down to whether it is possible to write a *believable* character outside our personal experience.
This question has been poking me in the brain since our phone conversation, now quite some time ago, so while Hannah is off at a play date and before I have to put the last touches on proofreading job #4, I thought maybe I would try to work on it.
On the one hand, there’s the piece of advice “Write what you know.” But I think writers can use this advice to limit themselves: “Oh! I’ve never done X, Y, or Z, so I can’t write about them.” I’ve never been a dwarf or a dragon, but that’s never stopped me from writing about them. *hee!* How many statuesque, naturally perfectly blond/red-headed/auburn, perfect-skinned women do you personally know, yet how many show up in romance novels? Do you think every romance writer looks like that? I find that doubtful, or they’d all be underwear models.
BUT, if I were going to write about a specific job—like a policeman or a nurse, I sure would do my homework first. Those kinds of details you get right or wrong, and policemen and nurses (and others) reading my work would certainly notice any glaring errors. I can imagine myself as a beautiful blonde, and I don’t need any special knowledge to do it, but if I try to imagine myself as a beautiful blonde nurse, it’s a whole different story. So that’s one kind of “writing what you don’t know”.
What about writing about someone from a different culture—gangbangers or Japanese or what have you? Even within a “culture” there is no one single way for members to behave. But if you portray someone as being a non-typical member of the society, I think you have to point that out. And you can only do that by knowing about the culture they don’t “match” with, if that makes sense. I have never been in a gang, so I would feel weird writing about someone who was, but if I felt it was really necessary to one of my stories, I would figure out a way to do it: watch movies about gangs or read about them in books or newspaper articles, something.
I think where you start having problems is when you try to get around the problem by writing stereotypes. A stereotype is a very flat kind of representation of a person; I know that I want to write real people, so I have to always be careful not to use the “shorthand” of stereotype, unless I want to subvert it (which is my favorite writing game). Don’t tell me someone is “trailer trash”. I know lots of lovely people (including my mother!) who live in trailers; look beyond that to what makes that person tick. If your character is tacky and a total beeyotch, have her do some bitchy stuff where we (the readers) can see it and make up our own minds. Of course the author is steering the reader to think a certain way, but let the character speak for herself. And if she happens to be like Britney Spears without all the money and with more of an attitude problem, then so be it.
Ok, now I am getting into bossy mode. Sorry about that.
While I was doing the dishes, another thought occurred to me on this topic. I think it can be hard for writers to *allow* themselves to write about stuff outside their own personal experience. This kind of goes back to the “Write what you know” thing, but I think it is also painful in a way to stretch yourself like that. Maybe it would be uncomfortable for me to put myself in the place of a rapist murderer (1) long enough to write about one, but each person has to decide for himself or herself. Ok, maybe that is an extreme example, but still, it is going to be hard to write about a person who is unlike yourself if you are not willing or able to pretend to not be yourself. If that makes sense. It’s kind of nice to imagine yourself as attractive and admirable, but maybe not so nice to imagine yourself as Hannibal Lector. Obviously you are *not* Hannibal Lector any more than you *are* Naomi Campbell just by writing about one of them, but you do have to be able to relate to them, get inside their heads in some way to be able to write them convincingly, I think.
An example: I read Annie Proulx’s
The Shipping News in college, and I just could not get into it. The main character wasn’t abhorrent, but I never connected with him. He didn’t seem able to have strong emotions at all, and I couldn’t *imagine* him in a way that I found satisfactory. (I seem to have lost my copy, so I haven’t been able to go back and see if he affects me differently these days.) I don’t think I would ever try to write a character like him; there has to be something in it for me, too, as the writer.
I know that I often suffer from “staircase wit”, where I think of a witty retort on the way to the car. But don’t think I don’t like to imagine myself as the person who gets in the witty retort as a parting shot. The thing about fiction is that characters aren’t *exactly* like real people; if they were, we wouldn’t need them, we’d just go back to people-watching in the park or at the mall. In most fiction (especially commercial fiction, I will go out on a limb and say), the characters have to have a little more going for them than the average person on the street--they manage to get in the parting shot--or they have to find themselves into a situation that is more dramatic than real life. No one buys a “memoir” about someone who gets married, holds a job, has kids, retires, builds birdhouses, and dies; look at that section of the bookstore: “My Life with no Legs”, “How I Pulled Myself out of the Gutter”, “The Prison Years” (all made up by me, except there was a book by a paraplegic that I saw in a bookstore in Sweden). My point is, readers don’t want “normal” characters, they want characters who are “normal-plus.” So we writers have to imagine those kinds of characters, even though we aren’t those kinds of people.
(1) I had this horrible dream in college where I was some kind of monster—raping and murdering—and I was going to write a story about it, but it was too upsetting for me, and once I got past the point of getting upset thinking about it, I couldn’t call up how it felt to be stuck in the dream anymore, and I wasn’t willing to push it. Without that feeling, the story would have been lifeless, so it never got written. Now I can’t remember all the details that made it so vivid the first time.
